Talk:Wallace Arthur

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Theories of Life and developing stub articles

After completing this comment, I'll add a few quotes from Wallace Arthur's (1987) book Theories of Life, from notes I made on 19th March 1989, found during my library culling. This book made quite an impact on me at the time, such that despite the huge amount of reading I've done since then, Wallace Arthur's name, and the title of the book, was etched permanently into my memory (which is roughly how I like to run my memory: know where to find the info of interest, and how to think about it when I find it). From the limited information in this article stub, Arthur's works are worth reading for anyone with an interest in evolutionary-developmental biology.

There is doubtless much more to say on this fellow that could usefully develop this article: certainly from the perspective of his theoretical contributions. What a tragedy that some scientists have very very well developed articles not because they are or were good scientists (they are and were: the ones I have in mind), but because they represent a combination of celebrity and controversy, and many people contributing to their articles are converts, critics, or sycophants. If a portion of that effort was directed at lesser known mortals like Wallace Arthur (who is not lesser known in the world of biology by the way), Wikipedia would not be so full of stub articles like this one. Of the 3, 443, 000 articles that Wikipedia boasts, a large portion are stubs containing very litte information of use, and which could do with some of the effort that busy editors plough into already developed articles. Wotnow (talk) 18:11, 3 November 2010 (UTC)